Joyce Carol Oates - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

by Because It Is Bitter

  And a faint roaring in his right ear.

  He says in his offhand voice, Bobo says he signed up for radio and electronics re pair, that's a useful trade, huh? And they're teaching him to re ad and write.. seems like Bobo went all the way through ninth grade never learning. They damn sure didn't bother teaching him in school, just passed him along.

  Minnie says, flaring her nostrils, That simple fool! If anybody did teach him C A T or D O G he'd forget the next day. She pauses, breathing hard. The old cardigan sweater buttoned over her heavy breasts seems barely to contain her emotion. Why are you com paring yourself to such trash, Jinx? You know you're superior. You're aggravating me!

  Jinx says, Why am I superior to Bobo? Only just a little smarter, maybe. In school.

  Smarter is superior.

  Yah? You think so?

  I know so.

  What kind of smart' we talking about, Momma?

  Damn you, shut your mouth.

  It's at that moment that Minnie erupts in one of her little temper spasms: shrieking and cursing, without rising from her seat she lashes out, cuffs Jinx hard on the shoulder, turns in her fury and frustration to dislodge a stack of old newspapers and magazines on the window ledge, kicking at them as they go flying. Jinx cringes, laughing.

  Waits it out.

  This long long day. Begun so long ago, in the dark, can't remember if it is the same day.

  In the machine shop at McKenzie Radiator, just inside the main entrance, there's a prominent calendar of the kind that ths plays just the date, the single date, in large black letters. Early on when Jinx Fairchild began working there he grasped the logic of the calendar, said to one of the other, older black men, You know why they have that there? The date like that? and the black man said, Why? and Jinx laughed and said, So we know we're going forward somewhere, not just stuck in the same day. He meant it to be a joke, but the other man just frowned at him as if he was some kind of fool.

  Truth is, Jinx Fairchild doesn't have much to say to the other black men at McKenzie. Doesn't have much to say to anyone.

  There's a tiredness leaking out of Jinx Fairchild's bones.

  Minnie's talking a blue streak, panting and puffing and complaining if she thought he was serious damn what she'd do!

  and there's Sissy Weaver! her. and Minnie's own daughters Bea and Ceci! and poor doctor O'Shaughnessy, who was the kindest most decent most generous man Minnie Fairchild has ever known! and doctor O'Shaughnessy's cruel cruel children! and Jinx Fairchild has rested his arms on the table and cradled his head on his arms, he's listening to his momma, to her aggrieved voice rising and falling like music, mixed in with a tremulous zigzag pattern of light, and the roaring of machinery or is it a falls in a river, he's listening es yes yes Momma nobody's serious Momma and then he's slipping off the margin as if off the edge of the table but it isn't the edge of the table he slips off of, he's just asleep.

  That you, Sissy? Who's that? You He's stumbling in his underwear, barefoot and dazed, out of the darkened bedroom, blinking, not seeming to know where he is or what's the hour. Heart knocking like crazy against his ribs as if he's in danger, as if he's been cornered in the lavatory at work by Bull Hudkins and Mort Garlock and their friends and he's going to be beaten and made to crawl; it's the time of reckoning at last, it's the time Jinx Fairchild has surely known is coming, all these years but no: it's just Sissy coming home: in that shiny synthetic maroon colored wig that Jinx hates, mincing and sniffing like

  Eartha Kitt, Sissy his wife, caramel colored good looking Sissy he'd married, swaying drunk, past 3:30 A. M. and when Jinx asks her where the hell she's been she says, upturning her chin Eartha Kitt style, With ma girlfriends, smart ass, where you been? pushing past her husband like he's hardly there, of no more significance than a piece of furniture or her own boy Vaughan, cowering in the doorway of his and Frankie's room, thumb in his mouth: Lemme past, damn you, what you think you are, police? Sissy's crimson lipstick is smeared not only across her face but onto her mauve jersey blouse and the blouse is buttoned crookedly in back and she's smelling of something stronger than beer, an almost medicinal odor, and there's a large damp stain on her skirt soaked into the tight clinging black OrIon; Jinx is staring at her as if he has never seen her before, he's going to let her go it seems, slamming into the bathroom where maybe like other times she'll have sense enough to poke a forefinger down her throat and bring up hot gushing splashes of vomit to empty her stomach and help clear her head. but, no, he isn't going to let her off so easy, he's fully awake suddenly and yelling, Whore! Bitch! Dirty cunt! into her face, his fingers digging into her shoulders meaning to hurt, and Sissy is squealing in pain like a little girl and slapping at him and her wig's askew and the sight of it pisses Jinx off more so he's pounding her against the wall, his lips laid back from his teeth and his eyes bulging so everything in the dim lit room is shaking and vibrating and the baby has begun to cry in his crib and that makes Jinx angrier and Sissy knees him in the groin just hard enough to throw him into a greater fury so he hits her in the mouth with his elbow and she's spitting blood and laughing, You prick! You! Who in hell're you.

  managing to get loose and seizing a brass lamp one of her relatives gave them for a wedding present and if Jinx hadn't seen the bitch lifting it to bring down on his skull he'd be knocked cold but he's got her, he's got her, he's got the bitch, walking her backward into the bedroom crying, Whore! Cunt! Dirty cunt! into her face as she's crying, Fucker! Shithead! Why don't you die. into his and they're wrestling together, Sissy's fancy clothes are being torn, the maroon wig knocked off, Jinx is saying, You no fit mother, I'm gonna take my boys from you, and Sissy screams, Anybody tries to take my children from me gonna have to kill me first, and them too! and on the bed amid the rumpled sheets and blanket Jinx is straddling Sissy's fleshy hips, Sissy is tearing at his undershirt, her long nails drawing blood from his nipples so suddenly his sweaty near hairless chest is gleaming blood and he knees her thighs apart, kneels between her thighs so swollen and primed to fuck it's as if his penis is hauling him down into her, grunting and pushing him down, down into her, her spread lips and the scratchy pubic hair she'd shaved off when they first were lovers so it's grown in uneven and she's clutching at him murmuring, Uhhhhhhh uhhhhhhh like she does, her spike heeled shoes now hanging from her ankles by their straps, her ankles locked behind his thrusting hips, and suddenly without knowing what he does Jinx is pumping his life into the woman, his fury into her, his hatred, his need to hurt, wormlike veins are standing out in his forehead, his lips bared from his teeth in a silent scream and Jesus how he'd like to draw blood from her how he'd like to kill her but all that will come of it is Sissy's wild rhythmic screams in another few seconds and her violent thrashing and pummeling and Jinx will go limp inside her, lost deep inside her, dead suddenly, collapsed on top of her heated body, limp and discarded. his breath whistling thinly as he sinks into something like sleep.

  Jinx you crazy asshole you know I love you, huh, lion? You know you ma man her eyes purplish bruised but soft and damp and acquiescent You know I'm not serious, don't you, any crazy old thing I say? and Jinx Fairchild laughs saying, Nobody's serious, girl, naw, nobody.

  It's a much folded, badly creased, yellowing document, this birth certificate: VERLYN RAYBURN FAIRCHILD born August 18, 1939, Hammond General Hospital, Hammond, New York. Contemplating it, Jinx Fairchild rubs his thumb repeatedly against the cheap embossed seal of the State of New York.

  Strange: you expect your birth certificate to be a large document , the size of a diploma at least. But Jinx Fairchild's is small, the size of an ordinary sheet of tablet paper.

  A pale glowering windy day, snowflakes blowing like tiny chips of mica.

  Birth certificate carefully folded in his inside jacket pocket, Jinx Fairchild takes the bus uptown on this Saturday morning in November 1963 to the United States Army recruiting station on South Main Street and first thing he sees, shyly entering the office, is that the smartly uniformed man behind th
e counter, seated at a desk, is black. which he hadn't envisioned.

  At once he's flooded with re lief.

  Then the second amazing thing: this man Jinx Fairchild doesn't know, could swear he has never laid eyes on before, strong boned handsome face, skin dark as Jinx's own, a man in his mid thirties at least, is evidently from Hammond, for it seems he knows Jinx, or recognizes him: rising quickly to his feet, re aching across the counter to shake Jinx's hand, smiling, happy, deep booming voice: Iceman isn't it?

  Something is wrong, something is happening.

  Graice Courtney's one o'clock American literature class, held in a third floor lecture hall in the antiquated Hall of Languages, Syracuse University, a Gothic structure of fifteen foot cracked ceilings and falling plaster and violently clanking radiators, isn't dismissed so much as abandoned, shortly before 1:50 P. M. of this Friday in November: an undercurrent of mysterious unrest beyond the room, stray lifting voices, isolated shouts, running feet both in the corn dor outside and down in the quadrangle below have by degrees so distracted the gentlemanly professor at the lectern that he gives up on his commentary on Walt Whitman, goes to the door, opens it, turns back a moment later to announce to the fifty odd staring students in the room, It's an emergency the President has been shot.

  After this, confusion.

  In a crowd of others Graice Courtney makes her way downstairs and out of the building, unwisely taking the spiral staircase in the center of the building, a nightmare structure, narrow, creaking, vertiginous.

  President? Which president? Graice and a companion are wondering.

  The president of the university?

  Then from all sides comes the news, disjointed and semi hysterical: it's Kennedy who has been shot.

  President Kennedy, in Dallas, Texas.

  In a motorcade. By a sniper. An assassin.

  And others have been shot: the Governor of Texas?.. Vice President Lyndon Johnson?. Jackie Kennedy?

  Has Jackie Kennedy been shot?

  Are they all dying? Dead?

  An armed uprising in Dallas, Texas: the John Birch Society no it's a Communist uprising.. Cuban attack. the rrorists Castro's re venge for the Bay of Pigs.

  Breathless and strangely exhilarated, Graice is drawn with a stream of people, many of them from her American literature class into one of the dining halls off Walnut Avenue where the public address system is tuned in to network news, news from Dallas, deafeningly loud. Her quick darting eyes take in the fact, in itself alarming because unprecedented, that the university's rigid self contained world has been shaken: there are undergraduates jammed in beside their professors, professors jammed in beside their students; there are secretaries, maintenance workers, kitchen help in their white uniforms. a sprinkling of black faces, workers' faces, amid the sea of Caucasians. And how stiff and silent and expression less everyone is, like frightened children, like people crowded into the cabin of a sinking ship, and Graice breathless among them, wondering why she is here, who all these people are, listening as the radio broadcaster keeps up a continual stream of words in which certain key terms re cur: Emergency operation Parkland Hospital.. critically wounded.

  .

  neck wound. head wound lone sniper. not yet apprehended.

  motorcade. Dealy Plaza Governor of Texas John Connolly wounded assassin not yet apprehended.

  A girl beside Graice says, in a whisper, Oh, God, I just can't believe this, can you?

  Graice says, No. Oh, no.

  Though instructing herself carefully: It's nothing to you re ally, you're here with all these others the way, the other night, you were with the Savages and their relatives, but it's nothing to you re ally, if Kennedy lives, if Kennedy dies, if any stranger lives or dies.

  Still, she waits out the news with the others, in dread.

  Seeming to know that Kennedy must die: the phenomenon of such an event, so public an occasion, can only mean disaster.

  She only hopes the lone sniper will not turn out to be black.

  The President of the United States is dead. I re peat, President of the United States John F. Kennedy is Immediately, Graice Courtney turns to push her way out of the dining hall, out of this press of people, desperate to escape. Suddenly she must escape. The collective stunned silence, the downcast teary bright eyes, the first sobs and cries of, No, oh, no. She can't bear it, simply has to escape.

  Out into the fresh cold November air where she can breathe.

  As others are pushing in, frightened, excited, near hysterical, trying to gauge from Graice Courtney's face what has happened.

  A girl whose name Graice knows but could not, at this confused moment, have said, cries, clutching at her arm, Oh, Graice, is he. ? Is he.

  ?

  Graice draws away. She says, scarcely moving her lips, He's dead.

  Stepping quickly out into the lightly drizzling rain, resisting the instinct to run.

  Her eyes have filled with tears.

  Angry tears: Hypocrite, liar, what has any of this to do with you!

  She's climbing the steep hill up from University Place past the Hall of Languages with its tall narrow gaunt windows now back lit against the dimming afternoon light, past the Administration

  Building whose windows too are lit, past Maxwell Hall where, on the wide fanning stone steps, several students, young men, stand talking quietly together, their accents foreign. She breathes in the sweet brackish air of late autumn, an odor of rot, of wet, of earth, of damp foliage and bark, heart pounding hard, senses keenly alert. So often, walking alone on this campus in the early morning or at dusk, she feels herself on the brink, the quivering brink of a revelation: but of what?

  There's a needle fine cold rain falling on her uncovered head, soaking into her cloth coat. It's a handsome coat, a deep winey red, with black buttons, a stylish collar, but it's a cheap fabric and the lining has begun to rip, the relentless wind off Lake Ontario easily penetrates its seams. Alan Savage has said, gazing at Graice Courtney with his kindly, wondering eyes, How lovely you are, Graice, how flattering that color is to your skin.

  Yes? Really?

  How lovely. My love.

  Really?

  In Strouse Hall, where the Art History Department is located Graice runs up the stairs to the third floor, to doctor Savage's office, to the Journal office, with the vague intention of speaking with doctor Savage not about Kennedy's death, not that, that's too immediate, too raw, too public, too impersonal, but about. it isn't clear to her yet. but she believes that when she sees him and he grasps her hand in his, in both his hands, as he does, saying, smiling, in that voice of absolutely genuine pleasure, Why, Graice! How good to see you, and how well you're looking! she'll know then what she wants to talk with him about, what issue must be decided.

  I don't love your son but I love you.

  I don't love Alan Savage but I love. Savages.

  Yes, I love Alan Savage, he is one of you.

  And I love, I love, I love. you.

  missis Savage will embrace her, missis Savage is a sof:£ melting lovely woman, she'll be grieving for Kennedy and for his widow and when she and Graice are together soon: tomorrow evening she'll certainly want to embrace Graice Courtney, her son's young woman friend, her own dear young friend, and, yes, they'll very likely weep together over this national tragedy.

  Though, as Alan Savage has several times pointed out, missis Savage is after all a Makepeace from North Carolina: there's a deep conservatism bred in her bones regarding liberals, Negroes, government interference in private lives.

  The door to Byron Savage's office is shut, however, and locked, of course it's locked; Byron Savage is away in London, lecturing at the Courtauld Institute.

  As Graice Courtney must know, since she'd helped him prepare for the trip, assembled and annotated his numerous slides.

  As Graice Courtney must know, since only the other evening at the Savages' Byron Savage's absence was conspicuous, and missis Savage said, Don't we all miss Byron? This house is so plac
id without him.

  And the door to the office of The Journal of art and Aesthetics is locked too, a disappointment to Graice; she'd hoped perhaps to begin work a little earlier that afternoon now that classes are canceled for the day, now that time seems to have pleated in a way that frightens and exhilarates her, as in a protracted eclipse of the sun. She's eager, it might be she's desperate, to get inside the office to sit at her familiar little table to resume proofreading galleys for the next issue of theJournal the previous afternoon she'd been forced to break off in the middle of a difficult and much footnoted article on Caravaggio 's The Last Supper at Emmaus this past year she's become nervously irritated if forced to break off any task before its satisfactory completion. Sometimes she discovers an actual eruption on her skin, thin weltlike rashes on her forearms, on the soft skin of her wrists.

  Her skin is becoming as sensitive as Alan Savage's.

  So you're a perfectionist, Graice! missis Savage has observed, with her chiding, affectionate smile. Just like Byron and Alan. I wish you would all keep in mind, perfection can lacerate the heart.